It flickered through Roisin’s head that maybe he was having her on. Sometimes Angus exercised out loud. He liked to see what he could get away with.
“I prefer a government that doesn’t work very well. Inefficacy is protection. Efficient? Efficiently what? Does it matter that the trains are on time if they’re on their way to Treblinka?”
“Spare me, Rosebud, there’s few things I despair of more than dragging out concentration camps every time a discussion gets sticky. Leave the poor dead Jews in peace. Can we get back on track here? I’m a decent person, and so is O’Phelan, though he’d never admit it to your face. But I just think there’s a place for results. I live in a world with this table, that carrot. Solid, see. Not a bunch of what-ifs and therefores. I see it all the time, the RUC getting so tangled up in its due process, mincing around West Belfast, well, we can’t do this, we can’t do that, and are the Provies following any such rules? No sir! Someone’s fighting dirty, you fight dirty back. It’s practical. I’m practical. Okay, Gibraltar. You flush out a murderer, he’d just as soon shoot you as blink, and you shoot him first. Simple. And you save people’s lives. You can’t wring your hands your whole life. You were right, calling me on that: principle’s only so important to me. It’s a slippery bugger anyway, ’cause you can turn any principle around to support what you please. So I stick with reality. I care about what happens. And put in my hands, I could make Northern Ireland a bloody decent place to live.”
Angus was breathing hard.
“When you sink to a terrorist’s level, there’s no difference between you and him anymore.”
“Am I threatening to plant a bomb in your courthouse if I don’t get what I want? Were the Allies the same as the Axis just because they fought back? There’s plenty of difference. That’s just the kind of ooh-worms aphorism comes from liberal castrati have lost the power to act in the world.”
Roisin’s eyelids matted. “I wish you’d let me differ with you without mocking me like that.”
“Don’t get personal, Rosebud! How are we ever to discuss anything if you take it personal?” He ruffled her head and pressed it to his coat. “I know you’re just taking the other side, and sure you should, it’s good steam. But you’ve your own sensible bits or I couldn’t stand the sight of you. It’s O’Phelan’s on my mind, see. Any idea the times we’ve been through this palaver? He has to hair-tear and screw everything apart until you’re left with fuck-all—like tinkering with your car until it’s strewn along the road in wee pieces, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can’t put your Peugeot together again. I couldn’t count the times we’ve started into some simple, tangible problem like how to win this election or even which pub to crawl, and in five minutes we’re paralyzed over how morality is pure defense of self-interest, and that would be important if anything was important, but it’s not because meaning is socially created, but then if you can see that, there is no meaning until the two of us are plopped in the middle of the footpath with our heads in our hands, like the three sillies can’t fish the moon from the lake.”
“There’s something to be said for self-examination.”
“You won’t catch me saying it. It’s bleeding dangerous. I think? You stick with your common sense, your gut. Goodness? It’s good to pay a call on your old gran. O’Phelan will tell you now, you don’t visit the biddy because it’s good but because it makes you feel good, so it’s bad. So he doesn’t go. That’s improvement? And turn it around enough times, you call on her all right, but to Raskolnikov the bird in the back of her head with a meat ax. That’s your self-examination for you.”
“Angus—do you like Farrell?”
MacBride laughed. “That’s like asking do I like my mother. You love her or hate her, there’s no in between.”
“So, do you love him or hate him?” she pressed.
The question sat him down. “Haven’t a clue,” he admitted. “Between O’Phelan and me, it’s something bigger. I don’t think there’s a name for it.” He laughed. “But don’t I sound like the lad himself, now? You’ve never met him, have you?”
“You’ve not introduced us,” said Roisin.
“I should, I should …”
Angus had repeatedly promised to introduce Roisin to Farrell for over a year now, but had never, strangely, come across. In the meantime, O’Phelan had surfaced so constantly in MacBride’s conversation she felt long ago she knew the man. “Why do you want me to meet him?”
“The bastard would sure make a play for you. It would exhilarate me to watch you turn him down.”
She curved the subject. “You know, I can’t imagine Farrell supporting internment.”
“Farrell O’Phelan would support the Spanish Inquisition if it suited his purposes. He may twist his hankie in his leisure time, but he’s the second most ruthless man I’ve ever known. Where he got the reputation as St. Francis is beyond me.”
“Second most.”
Angus beamed.
“I know West Belfast and you don’t,” said Roisin. “You won’t keep those people down. Put a husband in jail, three sons will take his place.”
Angus nosed into the icebox again, as if his steak and eggs might meanwhile have been generated by the sheer force of his hunger. “O’Phelan agrees with you. He doesn’t go for Plan B, not because it’s immoral, but because it won’t work. Claims we’ll never do a truly reputable job of oppression here. Opts for Plan C. Drab, but possible. Move, anywhere—power-sharing, integration, doesn’t matter, just close the book, so it doesn’t seem like if you kick and scream enough you might well get your way. Internal solution, we say. Then do nothing. Absolutely nothing. Take precautions, but let them blow up this station and that soldier and ignore it. Don’t try for a cease-fire, don’t pay them that much attention. Don’t react. They’ll get bored. The IRA will never quite go away, that’s too much to expect, but they could simmer back down to lunatic fringe. Besides, O’Phelan says we’d miss them.”
“You certainly would. Raving about the Provisionals is about the only time I see you completely happy outside of bed.”
“Then eventually, should it be economically advantageous,” he carried on, “you may get your united Ireland. And between you and me, I hope it happens. Just for revenge. Mean-spirited, vicious Proddie revenge.”
“You lost me.”
“Rosalita, I could taste it! Sure there’d be dancing in West Belfast to ‘The Fields of Athenrye.’ But the whole of the Bogside and south Armagh would wake up the next morning with a throbbing headache, in a right blue funk. Still on the dole, still married to a fat girn, and someone still has to fetch out for milk and a loaf. Except no more freaking riots. No more sonorous funerals, just your ordinary dead people. And those poor Provos, all used to sneaking off to Libya like your da, or riding Semtex under car seats, hearts whomping though checkpoints across the border—what are they to do now, go for drives on the Antrim coast and pick bluebells? Och, Rose darling, I would rub my hands, I would laugh myself silly. Stick ’em with what they want, I say. Just for revenge.”
“Then why not get it now? Give over.”
“Simple. Fact is—and you must never let this out—I don’t give a tuppenny damn, really, which way this place tips. Makes no practical difference. But I won’t have bad behavior rewarded. When a child throws a wobbler you don’t hand it a sweet. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom is a farce and will shrink to plain old England in the end. Republicans will get this island at the end of the day, so why not let the Loyalists win in the short run.”
“They’ve had it for three hundred years!”
“So what’s fifty more? Besides, it comes down to this: I will not lose. If I were Catholic, I suppose I’d feel the same way. So it’s all a matter of who’s cagier. Ask O’Phelan, there are no issues here. Winning and losing, it’s one of the only political scenarios on earth with any purity left.”
Angus had been ranging the kitchen rummaging cupboards like a full patrol of Brits; next thing he’d be p
rying up the floor. Much as snarling over the Provisionals was his most cherished pastime, he did not seem quite focused on this last part. His eyes narrowed off, his hand pulled at his tie, until he wheeled abruptly to his briefcase and rustled out a magazine. “Here.” He mashed his big forefinger on the face of a bleary photo. “Tell me. That’s talent? You find that attractive?”
Roisin took the Fortnight with a long, shrewd look at Angus before turning to the picture: an intent, inclined head with crazed eyes.
Angus recognized Roisin’s smile as the same one Karen used and snatched the magazine back. “Well? That’s Romeo?”
“No,” she said slowly, unable to dispose of the smile right away. “More Peter O’Toole.”
“You’re codding me.”
“No, early O’Toole. Just a little. And yes, he is rather attractive.”
Angus crumpled the Fortnight back in his briefcase. “Don’t see it. Never have. Skinny creature. No shoulders. Looks reasonable in a suit, I suppose. In the buff? Ridiculous. Arms too long. A glype. Should have seen him at nineteen. Covered in spots. A wonder even now his face doesn’t look like a strip mine.” Angus kept fussing with the clasp and it wouldn’t close. Roisin looked amused. “Well, I can’t comprehend it!” he exploded. “Even in university, you put O’Phelan in the same room with a girl, he lit out for the Cave Hill and she booked for America! And later, sure, he had his nutty romances, not with the barkiest items, mind you, but dead stupid, always trying to take care of him and coming to me on the sly to get him off the brew—”
Roisin’s little laugh was of an obscure complexion.
“—Och, you know those motherly Catholic sorts spend their whole lives banging themselves up on a cross, as if a soul will give them credit later, when I don’t figure even God himself gives them a glance. All that happens, really, is a lad takes their money and cakes and pot roasts and snuggles between their big overgenerous breasts, and walks off, pockets jingling with the silver. Well, if you were a glutton for suffering, O’Phelan was your man. They’d fix him breakfast, he’d call them names, but I understood—some women are like that. And then there was that deranged marriage after knowing the kid two days or something, which isn’t even long enough to get her pregnant and have a reasonable excuse. Now, she was a looker all right, but they both thought they were making a bloody film, they did, because in real life two days of courting doesn’t wash, thank you very much, which I figure they discovered about day three.
“Fair enough, those were rough times here; just walking down the road was dicey, and you never knew when the Seville with the Christmas tree air freshener dangling from the mirror would be your last parked car on earth; it made women do loopy things, though this one was Norwegian or something … In those days, the Norwegians were everywhere. All this, all right, but the last five years! The boy’s a regular fancy man! And all I see is Gumby. About as sexy as the Harland and Wolff cranes.”
“There’s more than looks to attractiveness, isn’t there? And everything I’ve ever heard about Farrell O’Phelan, from you or anyone, makes him sound a terribly fascinating man.”
“FASCINATING?” It was so much the perfect word to set him afire that Angus might have stopped to consider she had chosen it with incendiary care. “Is it fascinating not to know what you want, to be morbidly afraid of sex? Is it fascinating to be unhappy? Sure doesn’t that cover most of the world? And is it even useful, in a place as polarized as this, to be against everyone, when the one relief of having a war is being on somebody’s side? And is failure fascinating? Because what’s Farrell ever done, what’s he amounted to? Fine, he’s a hotelier, and by sheer luck, mind you, so he can get his shirts made with wee initials on the collar and order twenty-quid French wines. But your man dropped out of university! Not a term before earning his degree! And that’s typical, of course, not deigning to take part, quite, in ordinary people’s education, when who knows, maybe he got one bad mark! He’s like that, you know. All or nothing. Well, pretty reliable, isn’t it, in a world you have to share with a few other folks, that means the choice is going to be nothing?
“But I matriculated, with a first, and went to law school; I worked hard and nights, and finagled my way up the political ladder during bloody hard times in this country. That’s pedestrian somehow, knowing what you want and working for it and getting it? Because what’s so dead fascinating about going from pundit philosopher to curbside dipso? That’s what Farrell was up to while I was in the stacks: splayed out on the lawn of Queen’s, where he no longer attended class, screaming at marches too stocious to stand up or even to get out of the rain. Still, didn’t I give the kid a hand anyway, digs here, tea there, the only meals the boyo ever saw save the rashers from the women he lived off? And how many of my tenners went down that throat? While things were right tight those years, and every note I gave him went to Talisker—Rose, I won’t touch that brand now, can’t even stand the sound of it. Christ, is there anything less fascinating than a drunk?
“But right, now the women flutter around him, Trinity and Oxford ask him to speak, Panorama has him on TV. And why? Because of that rinkydink bomb-disposal business, when by all rights that should have landed him not on the BBC but in a private room in the Maze. It was illegal! He withheld evidence from the RUC and willfully destroyed it! How many terrorists are still on the loose thanks to Mister Helpful?
“But that’s Farrell, renegade risk taker, and it must make every female’s heart go pitter-pat. And, you know, I could handle Sinn Feín if I had to, long as I held my nose, but I leave them to Farrell, because he likes consorting with scuts—”
“Oh, Angus,” Roisin sighed.
“I just mean O’Phelan’s worse than the tourists! And then he’s so unstable. That’s the attraction, too, of those stories you’ve heard? Why, O’Phelan himself will slip into any conversation in the first five minutes what a horlicks he once made of his life, and never without hinting that he might do it again while you’re watching. Almost a promise, like. When what’s wrong with being reliable, what makes that so flat? Couldn’t we all fall apart now?”
“No,” decided Roisin. “It takes a certain integrity to fall apart.”
“Rubbish! All that precariousness is self-indulgent! And so is expecting some lovely will always come along and warm your broth and hold your hand!”
Roisin had started to laugh. Hard. She was clutching her stomach. It was the laugh that always melted him, the descending tin whistle, the eternal schoolgirl.
“Really!” Angus persisted, but her laugh was contagious, and his own mouth tugged. “Couldn’t I be a perfectly marvelous piss artist? Couldn’t I loll around on the floor from ten in the morning as well as the best of them?”
“No, no, no—” Tears trailed her cheeks. “No, you couldn’t. You don’t have it in you, teddy bear. So I’m sorry I poured out your whiskey. You’d never make a drunk, Angus. I’ll buy you another bottle. It was all a mistake.”
Angus chortled and agreed, but somehow felt—insulted, all the same.
“Oh, sweetheart,” she sighed, stroking his face. “I wonder if you ever talk so passionately about me.”
chapter twelve
Americans Have Good Teeth
Clive Barclay was a doctoral candidate in political science newly arrived from the University of Iowa. Damien discovered the student morosely propped in the Eglantine Inn over a shandy. Clive had been trying to sample local drinks, but the shandy, half beer, half lemonade, was understandably making him woozy. His interviews about Gibraltar lasted only as long as it took a pint of Guinness to settle, for The Egg was a newish, mahogany-stained pub with bright-blue upholstery, chockful of Queen’s undergrads. No place, Damien whispered, to find what was really going on. To get inside, you really had to go to a Republican club.
Damien dragged the latest American amusement to the Green Door, which frankly was inside only in the sense of being out of the rain. The Green Door was the butt of all Belfast, home of the paramilitary unemployed. Th
e club probably owed its original reputation to Sylvester, which he spelled Sailbheaster to support the Struggle, Malone. Sailbheaster dressed in black jeans, black turtleneck, black leather jacket with black leather gloves even in the warmest of seasons. His dark glasses gleamed over Doc Marten boots propped on a back table, a black beret cocked over one lens. Night after night he perched there, sipping his one pint—his mother wouldn’t give him money for more—licking his lips and sucking beer through his teeth. Should the odd stranger light in, Sailbheaster would finger his balaclava and confide, just between the two of you, he was recruiting for the INLA.
Sailbheaster at one time caused the patrons of the Green Door considerable embarrassment, but over the years he had achieved the status of mascot. When customers passed him on the way in, they didn’t knock him on the shoulder like a boyo but petted his jacket or rumpled his beret, and if anyone had something to celebrate, they bought the recruiter a drink, like throwing him a bone. When they tired of Clive, they would feed him to Sailbheaster.
“Taoiseach dail padhraigh pearse!” Damien cried on entering with Clive in tow.